I admit it. I haven’t paid nearly enough attention to this site for far too long. The reasons for that are many and varied, but a concerted effort will be made to correct that. A part of that effort is the following announcement.
I have written a novel.
It is a Young Adult Fiction novel titled The Salem Witches Book I: The Fifth Point of the Pentagram, and it will be available for purchase on your Kindle or paperback on Amazon starting this weekend. I will also set up a store on monumentscripts.com and paperback copies can be purchased directly.
It is about a teenage girl named Abby who has been groomed by her mother since birth to be a witch. She discovers a secret a few days before her 18th birthday that leads her to question everything she’s ever been taught, and she decides that she no longer wants anything to do with witchcraft. Her mother, however, has big plans and she needs Abby to perform a deadly ritual to see those plans to fruition.
This novel has been in the works for a long time, and it took a rather circuitous route to get where it is today. I first got the idea when I took a Young Adult Fiction writing class a few years ago. It was a 6-week class and I had Chapter 1 written at the end of it. But then I was stuck. I had never written a novel before and I had no idea how to proceed, so I went back to what I know and wrote it as a screenplay. My thought process was that the screenplay could ultimately serve as an outline for a future novel.
I spent a long time reworking the story working with writers’ groups and screenplay classes and coverage services and friends who read it and gave me notes. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this process. I would work on it for several weeks, then shelve it for a while before going back to it again. I always had the idea in the back of my mind that I would someday turn it into a novel, but life has a funny habit of getting in the way and interruptions became more frequent. I became more focused on trying to get the screenplay sold or optioned as more time passed. When that didn’t work, my thoughts turned back to the novel. YA has served as source material for a lot of films over the years. The thought occurred to me that getting traction on a book and building an audience through the novel might be the key to finally getting past the Hollywood gatekeepers.
Like many people, I found myself with more free time than I had had in years with the onset of the pandemic. I was finally able to buckle down and go back to my original idea of using the screenplay as an outline for the novel. Now the novel is complete, and I’m ready to send it out into the world.